Pregnancy, birth, abortion rates down among Georgia teens

<p>The rates of teenage pregnancy, birth and abortion in Georgia have gone down for another year, state officials said.</p><p>The decline reflects a nationwide drop that began in the early 1990s.</p><p>The decreases, which apply to girls ages 10 to 19, can be attributed to several factors, experts said. Teens are heeding abstinence messages, delaying the start of sexual activity and using contraception more effectively when they do have sex.</p><p>"This decrease is good news," said Dr. Stuart Brown, director of the state Division of Public Health. "It shows that the prevention programs and education conducted through DPH and our partners are working."</p><p>The numbers released by the state cover the years between 1994, when Georgia topped the national teenage pregnancy charts, and 2004, the last year for which the state has complete numbers.</p><p>In 1994, the teen pregnancy rate for all races, was 50.1 pregnancies per 1,000 young women. The rate dropped to 34.7 by 2004. In 1994, the rate of teen births was 35.6, dropping to 26.4 by 2004. The abortion rate in 1994 was 12.3 per 1,000 and dropped to seven in 2004.</p><p>Though Brown credited abstinence education for the decline, Bill Albert, spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, said it was hard for researchers to determine the effect of those programs. The national and state decline in teen pregnancy and birth began about 1991, while the strong emphasis on abstinence programs dates from about 1996.</p><p>"The general sense is that, among teens, there is a greater comfort level with not having sex," Albert said. "That is something fundamentally different than existed 15 years ago."</p><p>But it's not all good news.</p><p>While the numbers show a decrease in births among whites and blacks in the state, they show a jump in births to Hispanic teenagers.</p><p>The state government listed a number of other concerns about the birth and pregnancy data. More than one-fourth of all pregnancies among teens 15 and older are repeat pregnancies. Four out of five teenage mothers are unmarried. And pregnancies and births continue to occur among the very youngest in the category, those ages 10 to 14.</p><p>But the most sensitive section of Monday's statistics lay in the categories of pregnancies and births to Hispanic teens, which rose in nearly every age category.</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x1cdc298)</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2006/5/125083